Prosodic phrasing at the sentence level

Prosody can play various roles in speech communication. One possible function of pitch contour choice, temporal variation, or pause duration is to give phonetic support to the information structure of the message. In particular, prosody is capable of demarcating the syntactic-semantic units that make up the utterance. This paper examines how a professional speaker behaves in that respect. We dedicate our study to Kathy Harris, whose stimulating work in speech production has covered much more ground than the mechanics of articulation or phonation, but also addressed the issue of how a speaker's behavior reflects the higher-order, linguistic, organization of the message.